WND EXCLUSIVE

Palestinians kill baby, but Israel blamed

U.N. confirms media reports just wrong

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

A former Palestinian Liberation Organization member who was imprisoned for incitement and violence, Shoebat later became a Christian while studying the Tanach in a challenge to convert his wife to Islam.

“Pallywood is all about creating a theater of conflict in which Palestinians are portrayed as victims and Israelis as murderous oppressors,” he wrote. “The goal of the Pallywood culture is to push a political agenda by either misrepresenting events or staging them altogether.”

The U.N. report confirmed that the death of the 11-month-old infant son of BBC Arabic journalist Jihad al-Masharawi in November wasn’t the result of an Israeli airstrike.

He noted that among those reporting that Israel was responsible was the Washington Post, which had featured a photograph of an Arab man holding the body of his dead child on the front page.

AWR Hawkins reported at Breitbart.com: “Neither the Washington Post nor the rest of the media bothered to check Palestinian claims or to report them with an appropriate degree of skepticism.”

He noted BBC journalists used tweets to imply Israel’s guilt in the infant’s death the day the child was killed.

The U.N. report on the incident said a woman, her 11-month-old infant and an 18-year-old adult in Al-Zaitoun were killed Nov. 14 by “what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel.”

The report said the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights “received reports related to an incident in which two civilians, including a child, were killed, and five persons, including three children, were injured, as a result of what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short and hit a house in Al-Quds Street.”

The Palestinian terrorist group Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades explained, according to the U.N. report, that it was their “limited military arsenal” that caused the failure

“Yet the military capacity of the conflicting parties is irrelevant to the duty, under international humanitarian law, of these parties to take all feasible measures to avoid loss among civilians and damage to civilian property,” the U.N. said.

The report, which cited the thousands of rockets fired back and forth, also noted the “summary execution” by Palestinians of those suspected of collaborating with Israel. A number of victims were shot dead.

“The corpses of the six men were then subjected to abuse by dozens of people. Such abuse included being spit on and kicked in the head. The corpse of one victim was tied by cable to a motorcycle and dragged through the streets of Gaza city, accompanied by gunmen on motorcycles,” the report said.

Shoebat reported it wasn’t the only such incident in which Israel was wrongly blamed.

“A very similar incident happened at around the same time when a four-year-old Palestinian boy was reportedly killed by an Israeli airstrike,” he said. “As was the case with the aforementioned infant, the body of the four year-old was held up for news cameras, which in itself is very disturbing.”

“Haniyeh ironically stated that both he and the Egyptian PM had ‘blood on (their) hands.’ The presence of the Egyptian PM is relevant for another reason; Israel has suspended all air strikes during his visit for political and diplomatic reasons. This left one possibility – the same one that caused the death of the infant.”

The Palestinians were responsible “but got the media to blame the Israelis,” he said.

WND reported last month that the U.N. decided to dismiss a controversial official who was accused of intentionally posting a false report on Twitter that accused Israel of killing children.

Sources told WND that Kulhood Badaawi, a public affairs officer in the Jerusalem office of the coordinator of humanitarian affairs, had been the target of a year-long internal investigation.

The investigation, according to the source, said Badawi was found to have intentionally posted a false report on Twitter with a photo of a dead Palestinian girl. The posting portrayed the girl has having been killed during the 2012 Israel shelling of Gaza.

However, the photo was from a Reuters archive and was traced to a 2006 clash between Palestinian gangs, and the Israeli military had no involvement.

Prosor had written to the U.N.’s humanitarian affairs coordinator, Valerie Amos, about the issue, after Badawi was found to be using Twitter to incite local disturbances.

Amos was the highest ranking U.K. national and African female in the U.N. system. She also was the first African woman in a British Cabinet when she was appointed by Tony Blair.

In an incident March 10, 2012, Badawi tweeted what was alleged to be a photo of a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces.

The photo was accompanied by the comment: “Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by Israel. Another father carrying a child into a grave in Gaza.”

Reuters confirmed Israel’s explanation that it was an archive photo and also explained that the dead girl was apparently killed by a local gang and not the Israeli military.

Scene from France 2’s footage showing Mohammed al-Dura and his father purportedly under fire from Israeli soldiers

The al-Dura case came to a head in 2008 when the French Court of Appeals issued a ruling favoring an activist who claimed the purported shooting death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy – used to spark the “Al Aqsa intifada,” or uprising – was a hoax.

The court overturned a lower court decision against Jewish activist Philippe Karsenty, who had been convicted of libeling a French state-owned television channel and its Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Karsenty contended the TV channel France 2 knowingly misled the world about the event in the Gaza Strip in September 2000.

Karsenty told the Jerusalem paper the verdict “means we have the right to say France 2 broadcast a fake news report, that [al-Dura’s shooting] was a staged hoax and that they duped everybody – without being sued.”

Enderlin insisted, however, the appeals court ruled Karsenty failed to prove the news report was staged.

The lower court decision was overturned, Enderlin said in a statement to the Post, because “the court believed Karsenty had the right to stridently criticize the [France 2] report, since it dealt with an emotional topic, and that Karsenty’s investigation into the matter convinced the court he was being sincere.”

France 2’s report, purporting to show the young al-Dura lying dead after cowering with his father behind a barrel during an Israeli-Palestinian firefight, inflamed countless Arab youth to seek “martyrdom.” The boy’s image became iconic, appearing on murals and posters in Palestinian towns. Palestinian TV used an actor to portray the boy in “Paradise,” exhorting other Muslim youth to jihad. Streets, squares and academies in the Arab world have been named after him.

In the court’s decision process, the full video was reviewed, and one clip revealed the boy, who already has been pronounced dead, lift up his arms and head to look around before resuming the “dead” position.

Shoebat has posted online a video investigation by Richard Landes, documenting how some claims of Palestinian “deaths” were set up: